Following the 1918 Armistice, we had carelessly taken a wrong turning. After the Italian General Douhet in his book Command of the Air had extolled the virtues of the air bombardment of civil populations, Brig. Gen. William Mitchell raised the air power banner at home. Later Alexander P. de Seversky, a former Russian combat pilot, spread the Douhet gospel in a best seller, Victory Through Airpower. When the American press followed this lead, air force in war became the major role of the airplane.
This Douhet doctrine is, of course, the negation of the philosophy expressed in the great body of international law which developed following the Dark Ages. Chivalry, a concept devised by Christendom to protect civilization from destruction by the Four Horsemen, had introduced the era in which differences were resolved through conflicts between military forces, rather than the destruction of civil populations. Behind the morality of the principle lay the practical consideration that it spared the conqueror the expense of rebuilding establishments which he himself might otherwise have battered down.
If Douhet, in our time, mistook air force for the foundation of air power, our British cousins, in the Elizabethan Era, had not failed to look at sea power through the correct end of the telescope. After fifteenth-century geographic discoveries had placed Britain at the crossroads of maritime commerce to America, Asia, and Africa, her merchants and mariners recognized freedom to trade as the guarantee of prosperity. The basic requirement for freedom to trade was a superior fleet, utilized to guarantee, hopefully through measures short of war, the right of all and sundry to proceed upon their lawful occasions. Having seen the vision, the English mustered the courage and enterprise to seize control of the sea and employ it to build Pax Britannica, a period of spiritual as well as material progress, motivated by the Christian ideal, such as the world had not hitherto known.
In the early 1930’s, after American commercial air transport had revealed its potentialities, we Americans likewise stood at a crossroads. Had we but recognized our opportunity and displayed the courage and enterprise to foster a forward-looking air policy, we might have so directed our superior technology in the air as to match Pax Britannica with Pax Aeronautica. History discloses that the peaceful progress of civilization has always been paced by discoveries in transport. Had we recognized the revolutionary character of air transport, we might have removed enough of the causes of war to have avoided World War II. Instead, we hamstrung our own air power and provided our enemies with a favorable opportunity to seize control of the air.
The performance of air transport in the war revealed that the air is like an ocean that affords uninterrupted access to any spot on land or sea. Experience proves that the airplane, contrary to widespread belief, is inherently an economical vehicle. It demands no costly investment in fixed rights of way; its right of way is the air, which is free and infinitely flexible. Since the speed of the airplane permits it to transport goods a maximum of ton-miles for a minimum of initial investment, airline ownership of property of any kind is at a minimum. During the thirty-year life of air-mail service, the United States Post Office Department has recovered through sales of air-mail stamps alone more than it has paid out to the airlines for carrying the mails. While segments of the airline transport system have been subsidized in the interests of national security, the system as a whole has proved self-sustaining. The Postmaster General regards air mail not as an expense but as an investment. He recently stated publicly, “Probably no investment made by this government ever returned greater national benefits in commercial and cultural progress, and national security.”
It therefore seems a pity that, at the moment when providence has placed in American hands the instrument with which to speed world recovery, we should lack the wit to recognize the opportunity, and the initiative, courage, and enterprise to exploit it. Where the mission of the Air Force is to enforce the peace, the major role of the airplane is in air commerce, the key to world recovery. Responsibility for utilizing air power for peace resides with the people of the United States.
To air craftsmen, Orville Wright’s reaction served to emphasize the fact that all of us had been sucked up by the slipstream of our own propellers and whirled about like withered leaves or bits of waste paper. Yet underneath we knew that this apparently confused and wasteful process had accelerated progress. As engineers, we realized that when an airplane is earthbound with its engine revving up, the engine’s power is all wasted in noise and heat. In free flight, on the other hand, an airscrew converts upward of 80 per cent of its power into “effective forward thrust,” leaving but 20 per cent as “slip.” Our slipstream is therefore an efficient machine measured by any standard. To permit aviation to soar to new heights we must cast off its shackles. To this end we must needs understand its fundamental import.
My own thinking along this line began one November day in 1918, while watching the vaunted German High Seas Fleet surrender to the famed British Grand Fleet. At that time I was chief engineer of the battleship Arkansas, one of five American vessels that comprised Adm. Hugh Rodman’s Sixth Battle Squadron of Sir David Beatty’s Grand Fleet. Beatty had a secret weapon, a force of aircraft carriers. Some observers ascribed the German surrender to knowledge of this fact, yet Beatty himself realized that victory had been won, not by the ironclads which, since Jutland had not come into decisive action, but by the battered nine-knot tramps, the doughty drifters and trawlers, the troop-carrying liners and the wallowing tankers—merchantmen that had been keeping the life blood coursing through the Empire’s veins. Watching this triumph of sea power, even as the shadow of an airplane flitted across the gun turrets of the Grand Fleet, I had sought to draw an analogy between sea power and air power but had dismissed the idea because there had been no such thing then as commercial air transport.
The war over, Rear Adm. William Adger Moffett, founder and first Chief of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, called me in from general service to specialize in aircraft engine production and, incidentally, to lend him a hand in his fight with Brig. Gen. William Mitchell, Assistant Chief, U.S. Army Air Service. This conflict between belligerent giants was more than a revival of the old Army-Navy Game. To the admiral, an inspiring leader and astute politician, the task was to prevent Mitchell, a brilliant pilot and ardent air enthusiast, from monopolizing all aviation—commercial, naval, and military—under an administrative setup resembling the new British Air Ministry. This separate and independent department, in the opinion of the admiral, had already begun to wreck British naval aviation and thus undermine British sea power.
Amid the rough and tumble of interdepartmental politics, I discovered the fundamental precepts of aeronautic technology: the power plant was the heart of the airplane; progress in its development could be measured in terms of “pounds per horsepower”; the key to technological progress was competition within the private manufacturing and transport industries; under pressure of free competition, the “impossible” got done today—the fantastic took a little longer. It was no accident that the airplane had been invented in America or that it had here attained its maximum development. Technological leadership stemmed directly from the concept under which our government had been created, the creative idea of the dignity of the individual and his innate right to liberty under just law.